Friday, January 22, 2010

In the beginning part 2

Just one more thing about the early years. Just remember when you see that kid that doesn't fit in and seems different, that is unkempt with sad eyes, that was me. Love the kid and pray for that kid, b/c it just might be that you don't know what kind of terrible suffering the child is going through. You could be the one person who can impact and change the life of that child, if by no other way, but by praying.

I did forget one things that happened in the early years. My mother began going to a drug abuse recovery program when I was pretty young. I really grew up around that program. It was called PDAP and was mainly teenagers. I looked up to those kids immensely. I would hear them talk about doing drugs while they smoked cigarettes. I thought they were all so cool and I wanted to be just like them. This was not really the intention my mother had for allowing me to spend time with them. I heard all the drug stories and learned so much about drugs. It's not that they necessarily told me about it or tried to influence me, but they talked about them in front of me and I soaked it in like a sponge. I was just a little kids to them and didn't really fit it with them, but I figured out that if I did drugs then I could be in recovery and I would be cool and fit in; then I wouldn't just be some little kid. I think I decided after having hung around them for most of my middle child hood in 5th and 6th grade that I wanted to find a way to start doing drugs. I am sure that is not what my mother would have thought was going on. I forgot that I was also in gymnastics, Mary Lou Retton was my hero and I wanted to be in the Olympics.

From this point on there are some pretty gory details so buckle up. You may find out more about me than you want to. I have done some things I should be pretty ashamed of only I have been forgiven and redeemed so the shame is gone and I can tell the stories.

In 7th grade, Bell and AT&T were split into two different companies. My mom went with At&T which moved her work place from downtown Fort Worth to Irving. We moved north to Bedford. I really, really did not fit it there. There was so much money in Bedford. I guess kind of like Plano, only I was certified "white trash". I started off the year ok and was on the gymnastics team, but it did not take me long to gravitate toward the "stoners" and "headbangers". I had begun to get into metal music in 6th grade. I was also into new wave and a little punk. I saw my first real mo hawk at Bedford Junior high. It was on the head of a girl named Katie and I thought she was the coolest thing I had ever seen. The skaters/new wavers did not really welcome me so I ended up with the stoners. There is no way that I would have fit in with the "preppies" as we called them. I did not have the clothes, shoes or the look. I slowly gravitated more and more to the stoner crowd. For me 13 birthday my mom took me to see Kiss and WASP in concert. My wall quickly became covered with all kinds of posters of metal bands. The metal gave way to death metal (straight up satanic music). I started smoking cigarettes, pot and huffing spray paint. I got in with the older crowd and was introduced to heavier drugs pretty quickly. I was 13 the first time I tried Cocaine. At 13 I had sex by choice for the first time. The summer after 7th grade, I was sneaking the car out every night. One night I drank ??? who knows how much. I cannot really remember much after driving to Lake Grapevine. I know that one of the boys wrecked the car and I drank to black out. My mother found me unconscious on the floor of the bathroom and had to call an ambulance. I had alcohol poisoning. In the ER they were asking me what drugs I had done and if I could be pregnant. This is where my mother found out how bad things had gotten. I went to my first rehab shortly after that. I was in for about a month. I got out and continued to progress. I was skipping school a lot and taking any drugs that I came across with no thought to what might happen. Around this time the Crystal meth started. Things are a little fuzzy about some of these years. I do remember thinking I was cool and could fit in with all those kids in the drug abuse program now b/c I had been to rehab. I wasn't just the the kid anymore. I also remember thinking I was really fat (I weighed 115 pounds, but when I looked in the mirror I saw a fat person). I kept on doing drugs and being destructive; I ran away for a little while then ended up back in Psychiatric Institute for round 2. I had started cutting on myself and taking hand fulls of lithium pills. I played the game really well and was released to a halfway house. One night on the way to an AA meeting while staying in the halfway house, I stole a package of straight razors. When I got back to the place, I cut my wrist. They were not deep cuts, but I succeeded in being admitted back into the hospital. This time it was HCA Plano. I became more and more depressed and very violent. I was diagnosed with personality disorder. One night I took an earring and reopened the scars the had developed over the cuts. This hospital would give me Valium and Klonopin when I got upset and hit people so I got upset quite frequently. They would pin me down, drag me to the quiet room, put me in restraints and shoot me up with drugs. It was a fun game to me. My mother caught onto the game and had me transferred to Green Oaks. I spent about 6 months in Green Oaks. I did therapy and stuff. I don't have many memories that stick out to me from Green Oaks. I do remember one things. One girl mocked my scars and said her mom had sliced her arms all the way up to her elbow. Well, being the competitive person I am, I decided that when I got out I would out do her mother.

My mother ended up in Green Oaks; here is where she began to remember being abused by her father. This is where we started the journey toward dealing with all the secrets. She, at that point, was operating under the thinking that it had stopped when she was young.

At some point during this hospitalization, I began to realize that I had also been victim of this abuse. I believe I was about 14 to 15 in Green Oaks. This is the point that we cut ties with my mother's family. We have not seen them since. When my mother realized what had been happening to us, she divorced the whole family. I graduated Green Oaks and went back to the halfway house. In total, I was locked up for 2 1/2 years.

Somewhere, in all this (I can't place where it goes chronologically, but it seems like around 14 or15) I moved in with some people from the drug abuse program. We were supposed to be being sober. We were not. We ended up drinking and partying. We dealt X for a while and I did massive amounts of X. There was some weird witch crafty stuff going on too. My mom gave us money to help with groceries, but we spent it on drugs. I shop lifted the food we ate and the baby formula for their baby. Finally, I got caught and put into Juvenile until my mom could find a hospital for me to go into. It seems like this was right before the 2 1/2 year lock up stretch, but I can't remember for sure.

When I got free, I did pretty good for a little while. Then I hooked up with a girl I had met in Green Oaks. That was a pretty dark time of my life. I had sex pretty indiscriminately . I ended up feeling pretty used and worthless. I also decided I didn't want to be white. I hung around some pretty rough people (crack dealers). They had money and guns and I was a "white girl" so most of them like having me on theirs arms. I got infected with diseases that you don't really want to be infected with. I am damn lucky that I did not end up with HIV. That has to be God's grace. I tell you that really ugly part of my story for one reason. I had VD's many times and got one to the point that I was very, very ill; I am not supposed to be able to conceive children. I had pre-cancer at 17 and had to have surgery performed on my cervix. Yet, my great and glorious, gracious and forgiving God gave me 3 beautiful children.

I am not sure how long I was free, but the next place I went to was called Straight. It was a scary, scary place. They took a boot camp approach to recovery. My mom was at the end of her rope, though. We had moved to Irving by this time. Sometime between Bedford and Irving we also lived in Fort Worth again. Anyway, Straight was not a fun place. They basically used boot camp tactics to break a person down and the rebuilt the person in "recovery". We all sat in a room, in plastic chairs all day. We would be stood up and screamed at in the face over and over. One Fridays, they parents would come to parents meetings and stand us up and ridicule us for all we had done. The program required them tell us that if we didn't finish the program that they wouldn't be our parents anymore, that we wouldn't exist to them anymore. We were led around like dogs with our higher level person holding onto our belt loops. We weren't aloud to read anything but the Big Book (AA) or the Bible. We had to admit if we read even billboards or food boxes. At night we had to sleep in "host homes" which were home of the other parents who had children in Straight. When I finally got to Level 2 where we get to stay in our host home and have a new person to lead around, I escaped the first night. I ran off wearing boxers and a sweat shirt. The windows had alarms on them so you couldn't open them. I removed both pieces in a sheet and climbed out the window. I went to friends houses, none of whom would help me. I finally found someone to let me in. He told me if I slept with him and his cousin he would let me stay. (sorry for the awful stories, but if I am going to tell my story, I have to include these). I did (sex was ugly and cheap to me anyway, I didn't think I was worth saying no to anyone-I felt like I had been used up as it was.) They made me leave after the acts were performed. I felt so humiliated, used and alone. I had been being berated for months and told by my mother that she wouldn't be my mother if I quit the program. I didn't see that I had anywhere I could go. I walked to the grocery store and stole a package of razors, a pack of cigarettes and some white out. I then went behind at 7 11 and smoked and huffed the white out (it was all I could get my hands on). Then I began to slash my arms. I remember feeling so angry, alone and hopeless. I hated myself so deeply; I just wanted to hurt myself as much as I could. I slashed myself over and over and over on the front and back of my arms. I slashed my legs and put some small cuts on my face. I wish I had pictures of what I had done to myself. You would not believe the damage. I pulled my sleeves down over my arms and lay down to go to sleep. The next morning I woke up to the sun and realized I had no where to go so I called straight. They came and picked me up. When they called my mom to take me to the hospital they told her I had a gash on my arm. I was covered in blood, head to toe. My sweat shirt, boxers and shoes were stiff with blood. There was dried blood down my legs and every where else. She was not prepared for what she walked in on. When I got to the hospital, they had to rip the sweat shirt off of my arms. Then they took plastic brushes and scrubbed the wounds til they bled again. It was excruciating. I think I had to be held down, but the fuzz from the inside of the sweat shirt was fused with the scabs that had formed. There were huge pieces of subcutaneous flesh sticking out of the gashes. I had finally outdone the girl from Green Oaks mom. They then began to stitch me up without numbing the skin. There were to many cuts to be able to put lidocaine in them. I ended up with 90 stitches. Then it was back to Straight. I can remember how bad my arms ached for weeks and weeks. It wasn't the skin; it was a deep muscle ache. You can see the scars if you look at my arms. Children are usually the ones who notice and ask what happened. They were bright red for about 5 years. They are all white now; when I got my sleeve it was pretty painful to tattoo over them.

I forgot to mention that my brother was in straight too. He went in first, then mom put me in. After my arms healed and the stitches were removed, we both began to "misbehave" (that is what it was called when one stopped working the program). We were a pretty violent team. The boys sat on one side of the room and the girls on the other. One of us would start throwing chairs and hitting people then the other would start, so we could get the whole room in an uproar. Finally, they decided that we were uncontrollable so they shipped us and 3 other misbehavors off to the Straight in Florida.

I wasn't in Florida Straight too long b/c I hit a staff member and gave her a concussion so they committed me. I went into a place called Horizon for a bit (not sure how long). Then mom flew up withdrew me from Horizon and with drew my brother from Straight; we rode a bus back to Irving, TX. I had just had it. I was tired of being in pain and feeling empty. I saw not reason for my life or suffering. I planned all the way home on the bus to take the bottle of pills I knew that my mom had in her purse. I think my mom had it set up for me to go back into a hospital a couple days after we got back. We got home and went to bed. My intention had been to take the pills when she fell asleep. I fell asleep and woke up very annoyed at myself. It was still a couple hours before anyone got up so I went into the bath room cut my arms again and swallowed 170 Tegritol. God must have made me fall asleep that night b/c as it was that 2 hours almost killed me. I would not have been alive in the morning if I had taken them when I had intended to. They found me passed out and called an ambulance. I was already going in and out of consciousness. The paramedic kept waking me up so I bit his hand. I really just wanted him to let me go to sleep. At the hospital I ripped out several IVs and pulled the tubes out of my throat. They had to put me in restraints to pump charcoal into my stomach. One of the doctors decided that I was psychotic and put me on Haldol. (not a pleasant medication to take.) I was in a come in ICU at Parkland for a week. The doctors told my mother that I should have been dead, I should have had kidney failure, heart failure and should have been brain damaged. They did not know why I was okay, but I do. God had a plan and He was not ready for me to be gone. The Haldol caused me to have muscle spasms called a dystonic reaction. My neck would tense up and my eyes would roll back in my head. I wouldn't be able to move so I thought I had brain damage from the overdose and I was freaked about it. I hallucinated that the doctors and nurses performed a ritual on me so I could sell my soul to the devil. It was so real to me that I believed it really happened for a long time. My psychiatrist and mother set up an ambulance to transfer me to another psychiatric hospital and gave me medicine to counteract the Haldol reaction which had progressed to full blown seizures.

About Me

My name is Dawn Hall aka Dawn the Butcher. This second name comes from my work as a makeup/fx artist. I love to sew and create things. I have been on a journey of discovery my whole life, but especially the last 17 years. My life had a very hard beginning. On July 17, 1992 my life was changed forever when I asked Jesus Christ to come and rule my heart and life. The last 17 years have been an amazing journey and adventure. God has been so faithful, gracious, loving and kind. This blog is about the journey. My hope is that it will lead me to writing the book I am supposed to write and maybe be used to Glorify God and draw people closer to him in the process.